Malaise Precis

Monday, May 9, 2016

The phrase has been seeping into our family conversations courtesy of K1. A search turned up this delightlful Colson Whitehead article.

Wherever
you hail from, you’ll recognize “You do you” and “Do you” as
contemporary versions of that life-­affirming chestnut “Just be
yourself.” It’s the gift of encouragement from one person to another,
what we tell children on the first day of kindergarten, how we reassure
buddies as they primp for a blind date or rehearse asking for a raise.
You do you, as if we could be anyone else. Depending on your essential
qualities, this song of oneself is cause for joy or tragedy.

You’ve
also come across that expression’s siblings, like the defensive,
arms-­crossed “Haters gonna hate” or the perpetually shrugging “It is
what it is.” Like black holes, they are inviolable. All criticism is
destroyed when it hits the horizon of their circular logic, and not even
light can escape their immense gravity. In a world where the selfie has
become our dominant art form, tautological phrases like “You do you”
and its tribe provide a philosophical scaffolding for our
ever-­evolving, ever more complicated narcissism.

William Safire, writing in these pages in 2006,
coined a word for these self-­justifying constructions: “tautophrases.”
This was in the midst of his investigation into the ubiquity of “It is
what it is,” as evidenced in its use by cultural specimens as disparate
as Britney Spears and Scott McClellan, a press secretary for President
George W. Bush. (Pause to reminisce.) Whether the subject is an
imperfect situation to be endured (“The new coffee in the break room is
the pits”) or an existential conundrum (“My body is a bunch of atoms
working in brief harmony before death returns them to the universe”),
“It is what it is” effectively ends the discussion so that we can stop,
nod in solemn agreement and move on.

According
to Safire, “It is what it is” has many tautophrasal relatives and
ancestors. “What’s done is done,” “What will be will be.” The striking
thing about his examples is how many of them preserve and burnish the
established order. When God informs Moses, “I am that I am,” he is
telling the prophet, “Look, get off my back, I’m God.” I’ve never argued
with a bush, burning or otherwise, but I imagine they’re quite
persuasive. “Boys will be boys” and “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta
do” excuse mischief and usually worse, reinforcing the dominant
masculine code. It’s doubtful that “I just discovered penicillin!” or
“Publishing Willa Cather’s ‘My Antonia’ was the most satisfying moment
of my career” elicited a gruff “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,”
but perhaps I am cynical. Popeye’s “I yam what I yam,” however, remains
what it has always been — the pathetic ravings of a man who claims
superstrength, when it is obvious to everyone else in the room that
spinach merely ameliorates the symptoms of an undiagnosed vitamin
deficiency. A scurvy dog, indeed.

While
the word “tautophrase” didn’t take off, the phenomenon it described
blossomed, abetted by hip-­hop. Sure, philosophical resignation has been
a part of the music as far back as 1984, when Run-­D.M.C. reeled off a
litany of misfortune — “Unemployment at a record high/People coming,
people going, people born to die” — and underscored it with a weary,
“It’s like that/and that’s the way it is.” But grandiosity, narcissism
and artful braggadocio have also been integral to hip-­hop from the
start, whether they were the fruit of a supercharged sense of self or a
coping mechanism for a deleterious urban environment. As with everything
interesting in black culture, hip-­hop’s swaggering tautophrases have
been digested and regurgitated by the mainstream. Last year, Taylor
Swift somewhat boringly testified that not only are “Haters gonna hate,”
they’re gonna “hate hate hate” exponentially, presumably in direct
proportion to her lack of culpability. Instead of serving the
establishment (monotheism, patriarchal energies), the modern tautophrase
empowers the individual. Regardless of how shallow that individual is.

More at the link. The article should also have mentioned that the original source for "What's done is done" is none other than Lady Macbeth.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Lubec, Maine isn't exactly a city. We were there last summer for a few days and enjoyed it. If what James Fallows believes is true - that breweries can be an engine of growth - all the best to Lubec Brewing. I enjoyed the beer at Water Street Tavern and the food was good too! The bonus was sitting outside and watching the seals.

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

One of the greatest triumphs of economic theory is that agents gain from trading with each other. The proof either from a Ricardian or an Edgeworth box framework is irrefutable and together with the Heckscher-Ohlin model have formed the basis for argument for free trade.

Reality has always been more complex however and recent research shows the consequences.

Cross-referencing
congressional voting records and district-by-district patterns of job
losses and other economic trends between 2002 and 2010, the researchers found that areas hardest hit by trade shocks were much more likely to move to the far right or the far left politically.“It’s
not about incumbents changing their positions,” said David Autor, an
influential scholar of labor economics and trade at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and one of the paper’s authors. “It’s about the
replacement of moderates with more ideological successors.”Mr.
Autor added: “In retrospect, whether it’s Trump or Sanders, we should
have seen in it coming. The China shock isn’t the sole factor, but it is
something of a missing link.”

Autor adds:

Mr. Autor, like most economists, is still persuaded of the
long-established benefits that global trade confers on the economy as a
whole. But he recognizes that angry voters have valid reasons to be
frustrated.“It’s a matter of diffuse benefits and concentrated costs, but our political system hasn’t addressed those costs,” he said.Some
staunch defenders of globalization, like Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior
fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in
Washington, also acknowledge that the federal government has failed to
adequately address the needs of workers dislocated by lowered import
barriers.But
the benefit of free trade is “10 times the size of the losses,” he
said. “Free trade really helps working-class people in terms of lower
prices for products. The benefits are skewed toward people with lower
income because they spend a much larger fraction of their income on
merchandise.”

If the gains from trade are as large as economists claim to be then why hasn't the political system found a way to fully compensate the losers in terms of lifetime incomes. Let's say free trade lowers the price of clothing by one dollar. Why not impose a tax of say 90 cents on clothing and use this tax to compensate the workers who have lost their jobs as a result for as long as they would have worked (perhaps until age 65)? Or, target the losers, calculate the size of their losses in terms of lifetime incomes and then find a tax rate that would equate these losses. The tax would not be permanent but it would trade off a higher rate with a lower time frame for the tax.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Cynthia Kral, 38, of Pittsburgh, said she would never vote for Mrs.
Clinton. “I cannot trust her,” Ms. Kral said, adding that she planned to
vote for a third-party candidate or write in Mr. Sanders’s name in the
general election. “I feel like she can be bought on anything, and for
her to be president — that kind of scares me.”

This and the obvious rush for the dollars that came after they left the White House.

Watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom last weekend. I had not remembered very much of it. It probably won't pass the new sensibilities of today. I found the depiction of India and Indians somewhat offensive.

In contrast Raiders of the Lost Ark did not offend me but would John Rhys Davies as Sallah be accused of cultural appropriation today?

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

In some ways yes as described in this article in Quanta with the same title as this post. But not mentioned often enough is this:

For the last 20
years, we’ve had exponential growth, and for the last 20 years, people
have said it can’t continue. It just continues. But there are other
considerations we haven’t thought of before. If you look at AlphaGo, I’m
not sure of the fine details of the amount of power it was using, but
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was using hundreds of kilowatts of power
to do the computation. Lee Sedong was probably using about 30 watts,
that’s about what the brain takes, it’s comparable to a light bulb.

This is from Geoff Hinton. Also interesting is this article on Demis Hassabis one of the founders of Deepmind on what the future might be:

Most AI systems are “narrow”, training pre-programmed agents to master a
particular task and not much else. So IBM’s Deep Blue could beat Gary
Kasparov at chess, but would struggle against a three-year-old in a
round of noughts and crosses. Hassabis, on the other hand, is taking his
inspiration from the human brain and attempting to build the first
“general-purpose learning machine”: a single set of flexible, adaptive
algorithms that can learn – in thesameway biological systems do – how to master any task from scratch, using nothing more than raw data.